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Maximize value, not quantity
I was chatting with a manager who was once a PO on a team I coached many years ago. This is only my best memory of the conversation (I didn'...
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Levels of Technical Leadership
This document describes why and how a tech company can offer a career path to its engineering technical leaders, that is, different tracks for “deep ICs” versus “broad ICs”. To motivate this evolution, we identify two separate pressure points: from the business, to grow an increasingly skilled and mature technical …
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Job hunting while day-jobbing (2021)
Interviewing is stressful enough, but interviewing while doing your day job?1 Yikes! Well, I just did it,2 and I’m here to tell you that it’s totally …
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From Prison to Programming
I believe that getting underrepresented groups into software development is a good thing. This is not a controversial opinion until you start talking about felons. Today's guest is Rick Wolter. He's an iOS developer who served 18 years in prison for second degree murder. Rick killed somebody and for some that's all…
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Lessons learned as a software developer turned project manager
Becoming a project manager after being a software developer for many years changed me quite a bit. Below are my thoughts and breakdown of the experience.
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How to distort Scrum until it no longer works
Hot takes and cold truths on software, startups, and the lies we tell ourselves.
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Advice for academic refugees
Recently I met a new coworker, a now-former professor who left academia.
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Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?
On looking for alternatives to Slack culture.
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Ruby concurrency is hard: how I became a Ruby on Rails contributor
For the past several weeks, I've been trying to fix a cranky spec in Karafka integrations suite, which in the end, lead me to become a Ruby on Rails micro-contributor and submitting similar fix to several other high-popularity projects from the Ruby ecosystem. Here's my story of trying to make sense of my specs and […]
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Taste vs. Skills
A simple mental model that can help you navigate your career.
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We don't do that here (2017)
If no one has told you yet, as your career in tech progresses you will eventually become a custodian of culture. If you run a meetup or a team, if you lead an open source project, or if you organize an event people will be looking to you to know what is and isn’t okay in that space. You get this responsibility whether…
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Restarting my career after motherhood
My story so far!
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Look How Big Is My Team
I'm used to getting asked how many employees work at my startup. For most people, it's a quick way to assess a startup's success. Supposedly, the bigger, the better. But does it really reflect success?
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Writing a book for O'Reilly
Part One of a series on how I came to be writing for O’reilly, and what the process is like
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How I learned about corporate firewalls
This is story about how I learned to be a little bit less naive about the web and how it works. But it's also a story of user experience and what we owe our users in terms of error handling - even when the problem isn't our fault.
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I used indie hacking to sponsor my own green card
The longest project of my life
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Tech debt gets worse before it gets better
Projects to pay down tech debt tend to start by making more tech debt. The level of tech debt gets worse before it gets better. The new, cleaner code is just adding to the mess until it allows you to finally delete the old code.
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To Become Wise, Do Less
Embrace leisure and abhor the need to always be productive to actually become productive
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Hi, hello, I’m back at it
*peeks hesitantly around the corner* Hey everyone. Tomorrow, after almost 7 months of a sabbatical break, I’m resuming regular publication of kottke.org. (Actua
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Leaderless Teams
Subscribe ◎⁃◎ Hello, Welcome to Connecting Dots, the monthly newsletter on Innovation Leadership by Brett Macfarlane . I’m back in London after recent visits to Spain, France, Netherlands and Canada. Everywhere I went, the need for leadership to do more
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Stop Being the Hero
Why best products and leaders are not heroes; they solve 3 layers of every problem
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Green Lumber Fallacy in Software Engineering
Distinguishing the trees from the forest in software engineering and how not to conduct interviews.
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Reminiscing: The retreat to comforting work
In Work on what matters, I wrote about Hunter Walk’s idea of snacking: doing work that is easy to complete but low impact. The best story of my own snacking behaviors comes from my time at Stripe. I was focused on revamping the engineering organization’s approach to operating reliable software, and decided that it…
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I'm keeping a job search diary on my blog
If you’re here, you probably got redirected from LetMyPeopleCode.com. This is not a scam. LetMyPeopleCode.com was my blog while I was employed in Developer Relations. Now that I’m pursuing other dreams, I’ve decided to brand on my own name, not on clever handles. That means shutting down LetMyPeopleCode.com. Rather…
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Professional Programming: The First 10 Years
Last month, April 2022, marked the 10 year anniversary of my start as a professional programmer.